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City Rep stages 'The Normal Heart'

The devastating impact of AIDS is examined in the City Rep production of “the Normal Heart.”

BY JOHN BRANDENBURG •
Modified: November 15, 2012 at 4:32 pm •
Published: November 16, 2012

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“The Normal Heart” is a play about social, cultural, political, moral and medical events, connected with the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic, and people's reaction or lack thereof, in the early 1980s. But the script by Larry Kramer is also a great play, as an Oklahoma City Repertory Theatre production of it made clear.

Directed by Rene Moreno, it was performed in 16 scenes, projected on a side television screen in the Freede Little Theatre on a modern, minimal set designed by Amanda Foust. Helping to create the mood of the period, too, were music, lighting and a wall of background imagery, suggesting the end of the disco-dominated '70s and the beginning of the Reagan era.

Jonathan Beck Reed was fiery yet deeply sympathetic as AIDS activist and author-surrogate Ned Weeks, who finally finds his true love, only to lose him to the illness in the moving finale. Avoiding overplaying the juicy role, Reed got across both the energy and “colossal ego” of a writer who could be his friends' and his own worst enemy, as well as that of his adversaries.

Matthew Alvin Brown gave a light, well-modulated performance as Felix Turner, a lifestyle writer for The New York Times, who prefers the good life to the good fight, until he falls in love with Weeks.

Drew Pollock brought more than rugged good looks to Bruce Niles, a bank vice president and ex-Green Beret who doesn't want to be as outspoken or “out” as Weeks, but has his own inner strength.

Particularly powerful was a scene in which Pollock described the incontinence of his dying lover on a flight back to Phoenix to see his mother, and the eventual disposal of his ashes.